


No Angel

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Backstory, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Military, Military Backstory, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 21:20:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1443367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The flightpath of Sam Wilson from Afghanistan to DC.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Angel

Sam's first deployment had been timed to the spring fighting season in Afghanistan, so his introduction to war was flying high in the thin air of the mountains plucking fallen soldiers off of rocks and out of the tight grips of their battle brothers, learning to triage and assess damage while running over uneven ground and ducking AK fire as he made his way back to the helo.

"You ain't gonna be no angel, boy," he'd yell at them over the rotor noise. "This is a strictly no-angel flight."

Sometimes he was made a liar of by a God whose plans for this miserable country remained a mystery. Sometimes he lied himself because it was a kindness. But most of the time, he wore the truth with an air of invincibility that buoyed others. He learned more about the power of faith -- secular and divine -- in that first tour than he ever did in church. 

His second tour was in Iraq and that tested his faith in ways he could have never imagined. It was mostly bombs this time, IEDs that tore humvees to shreds from underneath, and he had less time for cocky bullshit because he had to look for _parts_ as he staunched bleeders and covered burns sprinkled with shrapnel like jimmies.

He thought he would have been relieved to be stationed in Korea after that, far from the horrors of a hot war and stuck in a time warp of a miniature cold one. He learned to love the local barbecue and fried chicken and not snicker on joint missions with the ROKA when everyone acted like the DPRK was a serious threat and not a shitshow living in the Twilight Zone that just happened to have nukes. But his relief faded as the months passed; he put the weight he'd lost in the sandbox back on -- that fried chicken was good -- and watched his pirated DVDs and became the base star for a week after one of the variety shows... and he grew restless. And guilty. The TV was always on in the gym and the MWR center and the USO and it was always about casualties and the dead and he knew, he _knew_ , that he could not make the difference between a hundred deaths in a week or none at all, but he also knew that he was damned good at his job, that he was personally responsible for many lives saved. Nobody knew better than the PJs how many casualties in this war would have been fatalities in any previous one and he had been a part of that, was still a part of that, but his part now was training and drills and going out for beer and bulkogi afterward.

Next time he saw a flyer for AFSOC, he took one. Getting in was a challenge; staying in was a bigger one. The training was more extreme because the missions were harder, going places they didn't always confess to sending good guys to chase bad guys, coming in to rough terrain (narrow valleys, hot zones, night work, all of the above at once) and he loved it and hated it and never regretted it. 

The entry into the Falcon program came the way all good things came in military life: completely by accident. He'd been on limited duty after separating a shoulder on a rescue-at-sea drill (hoisting a 'drowning' 250-pound master chief at night, in the rain, over choppy seas) and the squadron S1 happened to be out looking for unsuspecting warm bodies while Sam had been on his way to the DFAC. Two weeks later, he had travel orders for a TDY at Groom Lake along with medical clearance to resume all professional activities. 

The EXO-7 was possibly the most amazing thing Sam had ever been near and he'd been on NASA duty. He had weeks of training before he got to put it on for real -- math classes, aeronautical engineering classes, repair lessons, more simulator time than he'd spent in the arcades as a kid -- at which point, it became the best thing that had ever happened to him. 

He'd been riding around in helicopters for years by that point, jumped out of Perfectly Good Aircraft (static line, HALO, HAHO) enough times to earn senior jump wings, and had swung in a basket dangling from a prop plane in one memorable exercise, but this was the first time he'd _flown_. And he never wanted to put both feet on the ground ever again. 

The thrill of it didn't even dim the first time he deployed in combat -- from a plane, not a helo -- and swooped down from the sky to collect a litter urgent casualty from an incredibly steep rocky mountain face in what could have possibly been Pakistan. The operator would have died otherwise; the zone was too hot for a helo to hover, let alone lower a PJ with a basket, and there was no way to move a stretcher off that cliff without a donkey and a ceasefire, both of which would have taken far too long to acquire. But Sam landed on a dime, let the other operators cover him while he stabilized and strapped in his cargo, and listened to them hoot in exultation as he tore off into the sky with his precious package. He might have joined them. 

The suit was expensive to maintain and not perfect; Sam got a lot of high velocity road rash and re-separated the same shoulder in incidents that were not deemed pilot error (he gave himself a concussion in the one that was pilot error). There were more qualified pilots than available sets of wings, but Sam got his air time and worked his way up to helping train the next class of pilots... who never got to get their wings because the program was shut down. Officially, it was because the Great Recession meant budget cuts and the Falcon program was a victim because it had such limited scope (a scope defined by very limited imaginations) and other units could perform those services and the money could be spent on other things (like more F-35s, the Edsels of the jet fighter age). Unofficially, it was because The Senior Senator from Nevada, who should have protected the program with his life because it was money spent in his home state, had traded it for something shinier and less classified. Sam never got the whole story, but it didn't really matter. He was going back to his old unit, unable to tell anyone how he'd flown on his own wings. 

* * *

"Get me in the sky, ma'am!" Sam begged Hill as he ran toward where the helos were coming in to land in neat formation. From the tail markings, they were out of Norfolk, which made sense but didn't give him any way aboard. He wasn't carrying any kind of identification that would get him anything but shot, not when nobody knew who was friend or foe. He had nothing that said he was SHIELD, since he wasn't, and even if he had had his CAC card, it wouldn't do much good. "Get me up with the SAR corpsmen, _please_ , ma'am. This is what I do! This is what I _do_!"

The helicarriers had had thousands of crew aboard and some of them must have survived. _Cap_ must have survived. 

"Give me a minute, Wilson," Hill barked back, sounding preoccupied. "Got a lot going on."

It took twenty minutes, but Sam got himself attached to the Nightdippers and hanging out the side door of a Seahawk as she rose into the sky. 

The rumors of what had happened were spreading like a virus, a murmured hush of disbelief as the smoke cleared to reveal a true horror that hadn't been felt since the Chitauri had arrived over New York. Sam got asked all sorts of questions over the comms and he could tell that they were waiting for him to squash the wild stories as bullshit, but they weren't. They had been infected to the core and the repercussions were too big to even imagine. Every US military installation was under lockdown; every sailor in the squadron that had flown up from Norfolk had been required to re-swear their oath of enlistment and disavow HYDRA (which proved nothing, even at gunpoint, but what else could anyone do?) and nobody knew how far it stretched -- Congress, the federal agencies, the security services, the _President_ \-- or what was happening in the rest of the world. 

Sam had been in Afghanistan when the Chitauri had invaded; he'd been as pissed off as everyone else was that he was stuck in the middle of a land that would accept no single ruler and amidst a people that didn't want them there, across the globe from their homes that were under attack once more. Here, now, he was at the epicenter and if he were honest with himself, he would admit that it felt no less powerless because the enemy was still nothing he could shoot. Nothing he could do at all but reach out and save those he could and pray.

They didn't have enough helos to retrieve the dead just yet, which added to the gloom because all of them had risked their lives to retrieve the corpses of their fallen brothers and sisters, had carried shrouded bodies through firefights because that's what those men and women had died expecting would happen. It felt disrespectful to pull up the field glasses and see a KIA and tell the pilots to move on, an extra defeat on a day when they had already suffered too many. 

Sam's helo and its partner had been assigned sectors covering the Potomac and they moved slowly and at low altitude, ready to drop in and pick up any survivors. There weren't any; they saw charred remains and parts of bodies along with debris from the third Helicarrier. The one Captain America had been on. Everyone knew, more or less, that Cap had been essential in whatever victory was going to be claimed today, but they also knew that he'd been on the third 'carrier when it had exploded. Sam told them that he'd definitely survived the explosion, but he might not have survived what came after. Cap's microphone had been hot; Sam and Hill had heard him pleading with the Winter Soldier, his voice thin and breathy for reasons that had nothing to do with his desperation to save Bucky Barnes, had heard him grunt as the Winter Soldier pummeled him, and then had heard nothing more. Steve was a super human, but he wasn't superhuman and the parts of him that the serum hadn't enhanced had remained as fragile and as vulnerable as any other soldier's. And Sam, who spent his days trying to help those whose courage and bravery weren't always enough to heal their wounds, wondered in a corner of his heart if Steve hadn't chosen his ending willingly and intentionally. 

They had two near-pickups, one they even landed for before realizing that it was a KIA, and walking away from that woman was the hardest thing Sam had done all day. But he mounted back up and watched her as they flew off, sick with shame and apologizing all the way. The search continued, the pilots relaying every pick-up made by the other search teams just so that they could have something to cheer for, even vicariously, as they moved toward the southernmost point on their grid squares. 

"Holy fuck! It's Cap!" HM2 Mota hollered from the other side of the helo. "It's Cap!" 

Sam wanted nothing more than to jump up and look over Mota's shoulder, but he had a sector to watch and so he would, even as he felt the helo tilt into a turn to draw closer. 

"Is he alive?" someone asked. 

"It doesn't fucking matter!" Lieutenant Cheung barked back as they descended. "We're not leaving him again." 

Sam jumped out before the helo had even landed, grabbing his Navy-issued gear and running the twenty yards to where Steve lay on his back, not moving as the river water lapped over his legs. Mota and HM3 Cornwall were behind him, appearing in his peripheral vision as he dropped to his knees next to Steve's chest and felt for a pulse even as he surveyed the damage.

"He's alive," Sam shouted as Cornwall and Mota started unfolding the stretcher. Sam had seen Steve get into the suit, so he knew where the hidden zippers and hooks and buttons were and worked on them as Mota did a pupil check and examined Steve's head for trauma. Which there was, beyond whatever the Winter Soldier had inflicted. 

"Someone worked him over pretty good," Mota said as he felt Steve's scalp for depressions and then shuffled over on his knees so Cornwall could bring the board in closer. "But someone also dragged him out of the water. This is not where he landed."

Sam grunted agreement that probably wasn't heard over the rotor noise. Steve was too clean -- there was blood, plenty of it, but not enough considering his injuries, which in turn were not consistent with even a limp body falling from a great height onto solid ground. The serum was undoubtedly the reason he had survived at all, but this had the markings of a water landing. Which in turn made Sam wonder how he'd gotten here; Cap hadn't swum to shore and if anyone had seen him fall and gone in after him, they would have called 911. The most obvious answer was also the least likely answer, but that was not his concern right now. Making sure Captain America didn't die under his hands was, however. 

By the time they got him stretchered and back to the helo, Cheung had orders to fly directly to a helipad in Arlington, where they would be met by an air ambulance. Nobody knew if some kind of secondary attack involving area hospitals was in play, a HYDRA plan to eliminate important survivors of their first wave, and Captain America was going up to Philadelphia and he would do so in a civilian transport so that they could get back to search and rescue work. 

"How do we know that they're not gonna be HYDRA and take off with him?" Mota asked as he started a plasma drip. "How do we know we're not handing him over to be killed?" 

Colonel Rhodes, in his War Machine armor, was waiting at the helipad, which Sam considered to be a reasonable answer to the question. 

"Wilson," Rhodes called over to Sam. "You're going with the Captain." 

Sam wanted to, of course he wanted to, but he also knew that he'd be of more use back on the Seahawk. Rhodes nodded at the conflict that must have been showing on his face. 

"I know," he said sympathetically. "But we need someone with him who has any idea of what the hell is going on." 

He handed Sam a .45 and an extra clip. 

"Yes, sir," Sam replied, the only answer as he accepted the pistol and put the extra clip in his pocket. He followed the stretcher across the tarmac and climbed in after it, rattling off the pertinent medical information to the EMTs now charged with the care of Captain America, who was not stirring even the slightest. 

They got to the hospital quickly, War Machine flying alongside the entire way, and a trauma team was waiting alongside a stick of operators Sam would bet real money had been flown up from Dam Neck. The team leader nodded at Sam and they followed the stretcher -- covered in a dull blue blanket to hide Steve's uniform -- down into the hospital. A couple of the SEALs went into the OR with Steve despite outraged protest and the rest waited with Sam just outside the door in protective stances. They, too, had questions and Sam answered them as best he could, but when you had to start your story with Alexander Pierce, Nobel Peace Prize winner, planning to kill twenty million people there was way it was going to be easy or make much sense. 

A couple of the squids had heard of the Falcon program and Sam admitted to them that he hoped he got a new set of wings to replace the ones that had been destroyed, but he also admitted that he wasn't sure he wanted to go back into action on a more permanent basis. "I'm fighting a damned important war already," he told Jim, the team leader, having already told them what his day job was. "I didn't join up to kill bad guys."

"Did any of us?" Jim asked with a philosophical shrug. "No reason you can't do both. Better than whatever drill the ANG's got you doing." 

One of the guys inside the OR radioed out and said that the surgery was going to take a while because the gunshot wounds were emergent but the cranial pressure might become a problem if it didn't start subsiding soon. 

"You should eat and rack out," Jim told Sam. "You've been running for days, sounds like. We slept in our own beds last night. And you can be damned sure you are not going to sleep through any attempt on the Captain's life. We will not go down quietly."

Sam ended up accepting a twenty from Jim -- he wasn't carrying his wallet -- and going down to the cafeteria and eating meatloaf and mashed potatoes and mushy green beans. He came back upstairs with water bottles for everyone and racked out on a gurney in the hallway next to the OR. He was woken up what felt like five minutes later but was five hours later because Steve was being moved to a secured room for recovery. He went back to sleep in a chair at Steve's bedside. And it was very much _Steve_ and not Captain America, pale and covered in bruises and lacerations and bandages and looking younger than Sam had ever really considered him to be. Guy wasn't even thirty yet, not really. 

When he woke up again, it was dark outside and the Black Widow was sitting in the chair on the other side of the bed, eyes on a laptop screen but she looked up when he moved. 

"There's a lull in the shitstorm," she said with a shrug. They sat in companionable silence in the dimly lit room for a while and Sam might've started drifting off again when she spoke again. "Why did you help us? You could've let us use your shower, fed us breakfast, and wished us well. I know why _he_ does it," she broke off, gesturing with a head tilt at Steve. "But why did you?"

Sam thought about his answer because she clearly wasn't looking for "because it was the right thing to do." She knew that, just as she knew that that wasn't enough, necessary but not sufficient. 

"I grew up reading about Captain America, same as anyone else the last seventy years," he finally said. "You won't be able to appreciate what it's like to see someone in a history book, one of your country's greatest heroes, with his arm thrown around a black man's shoulders decades before it was cool -- before it was even acceptable. The Army was still segregated back then, but there was Gabriel Jones, large as life, fighting Nazis and taking down HYDRA. That _mattered_. The Howling Commandos mattered." 

"And Bucky Barnes just spent the last few days trying to kill us," the Widow pointed out, but not harshly. She knew he wasn't saying that he had followed them into hell so that he could pretend to be Gabe Jones once more. 

"Cap, what he stood for -- what the history books say he stood for -- has always been important to me," he went on. "Was probably one of the reasons I joined up, even if he wasn't a big one. But I've also gotten to meet _Steve Rogers_ and what he stands for and what he's sacrificed for and that maybe reminded me of all of the other reasons I joined up. I left active duty... not on a wrong note, but not on the note I would have wanted. I maybe needed to prove to myself that I had made the right choice and that I was still the man I wanted to be."

She waited a beat before asking him if he'd gotten his answer. 

"Captain America trusted me to fight by his side," he said with a smile. It wasn't quite yes, but he thought she understood what he meant. 

"Captain America is going to stop trusting you to sleep by his side because you are noisy," Steve murmured thickly, eyes still closed. "The both of you. Also, you smell bad."

Sam and the Widow might've both lifted up their arms to sniff their pits at the same time. They definitely made faces at the other at the results. 

"Go home, _shower_ , sleep in real beds," Steve said, voice a little stronger even as his eyes stayed closed. "Nothing's gonna happen to me tonight." 

Steve went back to sleep, or pretended to, ending any argument before it could begin, so Sam accepted the Widow's ("You can call me Natasha at this point") offer of a ride back down to the District. She came in to the house with him, but only to perform a security sweep before telling him someone would be by in the morning with credentials establishing him as someone who had been vetted by the anti-HYDRA teams that were being formed. 

"If it matters at all coming from me," she said at the door. "If you're not sure whether you're the man you want to be, you're still a man I'm happy to know." 

She closed the door behind her before he could reply.


End file.
